


The Running of the Deer

by Aelin



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Gen, What Comes Next
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:25:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aelin/pseuds/Aelin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The weird thing about going back to the coffeehouse this time was that no one noticed anything was different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Running of the Deer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [impertinence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/impertinence/gifts).



> Picks up the morning after the end of the novel. Title from "The Holly and the Ivy."

The weird thing about going back to the coffeehouse this time was that no one noticed anything was different.

The SOF knew, of course. There were about twelve of them there this morning: Pat and Jesse and Theo and John and Kate and Mike and Sasha and a couple of others I didn’t even know. Enough so that I was already revising my morning baking plans to include whatever had the most volume for the least time. I did a quick, complete-with-reflexive-flinch scan when I saw the group of them, but I didn’t think any of them were Goddess hangers-on. I was assuming Mrs. Bialosky knew, too—I didn’t know how she would, but I remembered my vision, or my imagining, whatever, of her and Maud from before, standing vigil over me with their heads bowed, and I saw the way she looked at me the first time I stuck my head out of the bakery: happy, but in a grave way, like she knew what I’d faced and was proud of me.

I hadn’t quite gotten to the point where I was proud of me, but I thought it might be a nice point to get to.

I didn’t think anyone else could tell that anything had happened. Pat or Jesse could have told Charlie about it, but I didn’t think they would. They were still working too hard to win my confidence to do that. And this wasn’t like last time, when everyone had thought I was dead and I’d come back banged up and wild-eyed and hanging onto sanity with my floury fingernails. If I looked at all different now, it was probably in a good way, and I’d been so off for so many months that what were they going to say—“Gee, Sunshine, you still seem weird, but in a slightly different way than last week”?

There were benefits to being someone no one could count on to be normal, I was finding, and one of them was the lack of questions.

Mel was the only one who said anything at all. He came into the bakery after the breakfast rush and brushed a kiss on my cheek and told me I was looking good—in a Mel way, not in a sleazy way, so it meant he thought I looked well-rested and happy, not that I looked like someone he’d hit on in the street. (I glare too hard for anyone to hit on me in the street, anyway. Comes with the bitch territory.) I told him thank you, I was feeling better, and I didn’t even flinch away from the kiss.

That last bit took some effort, because the other weird thing about that morning was that my skin felt off. Not the way it had after the thing with—but I didn’t want to think his name just at the moment, not in the coffeehouse, even if it was all over—but no, this was more like my skin felt new. I don’t mean this in the way it’s sometimes used in your cheesier romance novels, where the hero is touching the heroine and it’s so overwhelming that it’s like she’s never been touched before etc. More like I kept thinking I had gloves on—some really thor gloves with lots more nerve endings than gloves usually have, like maybe the medical guys had finally perfected the fake replacement skin they’ve been working on for years and had given me some. My hands didn’t remember what to do with cinnamon roll dough.

My brain knew what to do with it, fortunately, and it got my hands with the program pretty quickly. But it meant that everything I did had to be intentional, like when I first got my dark vision and kept overreaching for things because my depth perception was all off. Now my eyes were fine, but my skin kept being surprised by things. And not just my hands: my apron strap felt funny around my neck, and my hair brushing the side of my face was such a distraction I had to put it up in an even tighter mercenary bun than usual. Which of course my fingers didn’t remember how to do.

I tried to think what I might have done last night that would have that effect on me. But that was another thought I couldn’t have during a morning in the coffeehouse—not because it was so terrible, but because it wouldn’t fit. Like if I tried to think about the things I had seen last night, with Con, the walls of the coffeehouse might give way and collapse. Or maybe just the walls of my head.

Anyway, that point is I had to work very hard all morning to do the things that should have been easy, and to make them look like they were easy, because I was enjoying the lack of questions and I didn’t want anyone to start up with it. Charlie hadn’t given me one of his earnestly concerned looks yet this morning, and I didn’t miss them.

If I hadn’t been working so hard to be normal, I probably would have noticed sooner that Mr. Quist was back.

Mr. Quist was one of our regulars only in the strictest sense of the word: he did come in at regular intervals, but the intervals were usually several months apart. Not frequent enough to make him memorable, really, but I remembered him anyway because of his peculiar hair. It stood up straight for a distance of a solid two inches from his head, and if you think that doesn’t sound strange, you haven’t thought about how long two inches is. That maybe wouldn’t have been so weird—you get way weirder looks from the hype heads around here—but he was always so boringly respectable otherwise that it stood out. I always figured it had to be genetics rather than style choice, but I had never asked, even when I was much younger and could have gotten away with it.

He wasn’t the chatty type, either, so I had never really had a conversation with him longer than, “Did you want cream and sugar with that?” I only knew his name because we asked for it with orders. Even then I sort of half-suspected it was fake, because his suits were always bland in the way you see on bodyguards of FBI agents to make them blend in, except they don’t because no one else is ever as bland as they are, and it suited my overactive imagination to pretend he was the kind of person who went around giving fake names in coffeehouses so They wouldn’t catch him (whoever They were).

He was extra bland today, and it was a shock to see him, because—and I didn’t realize this until I saw him—it had been years. I hadn’t been thinking about him or anything, and it’s not like he was someone I would have missed, but as soon as I saw him it was that weird flash of someone you used to see all the time and now haven’t for a long while.

Even with all that, he probably would only have gotten a brief _oh, him_ —I was busy adjusting to my new glove-skin, and he was never someone I’d interacted with, except for noticing his funny hair—but I noticed him right away and kept noticing because he was very busily _not_ noticing me. Not noticing me in that very pointed way that meant I was the only thing he was noticing, really. I don’t know if it was something I would have spotted, before, but I did right away now; I think it had something to do with the way the shadows in the room where pointing at him. Like they were following lines of attention, and even though his eyes weren’t on me, I _knew_ that his attention was. Like a goddamn hypercharged sniper.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you could call someone on, though (what was I going to say: “Stop not looking at me”?), and I had other things to think about: blasted carthaginian nerve endings that kept being surprised by what things felt like, for one thing, and pretzel rolls that refused to get the proper rise, probably because I was kneading it wrong. I never knead my pretzel rolls wrong. And he could easily have just been one of the gawkers who hadn’t made it to the coffeehouse in the direct aftermath of the events earlier in the summer and was making up for it now. In any case, the bitter chocolate deaths were refusing to set properly for the first time in years and the voodoo sunsets were looking paler than usual and I was ready for my skin to feel like my own again, thanks, so I forgot about him pretty quickly, until he showed up at the door to my bakery.

It’s not too hard to make your way into the bakery, if you’re a coffeehouse guest. Lots of our regulars will come back to chat or sneak a bit of batter or a fresh slice of something hot even though it’s not allowed, and Charlie or the wait staff will really only stop you if you’re being disruptive, or if you’re one of the louder hype heads who want everyone to know what’s going on with their current trip. Plus, they know I can handle myself, and that a glare and a rolling pin are enough to keep most people away if I really want them away. So it wasn’t a surprise that Mr. Quist could make it back there. Only a surprise that he wanted to.

“Rae Seddon,” he said, startling me out of my peeling of apples (we were coming up on that season again).

He said it less like a greeting and more like he was labeling me. Like I said, I’m good at turning people away when I want to. And a stranger—even a regular stranger—showing up at my bakery door is a time when I want to. Plus, I don’t like being labeled, even if it’s with my own name.

“Guests aren’t allowed back here,” I said. I didn’t stop my peeling, but I was suddenly paying a lot more attention to him, because he kept standing there without moving and—this sounds like a hard thing to pick up on, but it wasn’t—without any of the nervousness or hesitation that usually comes with someone wondering if they should interrupt someone else at work and what they should say. He was just standing, still enough that he should have been unnoticeable but actually he was the opposite, a little like a—like a vampire.

A second later I slammed that thought back down where it belonged, because there is no confusing a vampire with anything else, and this man was definitely not a vampire. It was weird that I’d thought it, though. Yeah, he was oddly steady, but so was Yolande and lots of other people, and they had never made me think of vampires even for a second.

“I’d like to speak with you, if that’s all right,” he said. His voice was as bland as his suit, and he said “if that’s all right” like it didn’t really matter if it was or not. “We…have a friend in common.”

That was unnerving, because I don’t have that many friends. Not friends that don’t work in the coffeehouse, anyway, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he meant. Unless he was friends with Aimil—and I couldn’t see her spending time with anyone who wore a suit that stiff—there weren’t a whole lot of other people he could mean besides Con.

It was enough to make all the muscles in my back and arms go tense. “Do we?” I asked, and my hands wanted to shake, but I kept them moving the peeler through the apple skin: and-one-and-two-and-three, turn. And-one-and-two-and-three, turn. I had faced interrogation from the Goddess of Pain. I could take him.

“She said to give you this,” he said, and I looked up and just about dropped the apple, because it was _my grandmother’s skegging ring._

It was sitting in Mr. Quist’s hand, a monstrosity of curlicues and green, and he was watching me levelly. Like he knew the effect it was having on me and was pleased about it.

“Sunshine?” said a voice over Mr. Quist’s shoulder, and I looked up to see Pat, and behind him Jesse and Theo. They were hovering in that vaguely menacing way SOFs do when they don’t want trouble but damn well mean to stop it when it arises.

It hadn’t occurred to me that they were here to look out for me as well as to watch me. I had forgotten to think of myself as someone who needed protecting. I couldn’t decide if I was glad to see them or if they made everything more dangerous.

“Everything okay?” Pat asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at the ring again, but there was no chance of me being wrong about it: there were the whorls of silver dotted with the proliferation of green stones I had made myself, out of the simple red solitaire. Not the biggest bit of magic I’d ever done, but the biggest by the age of ten. The one I’d been most ashamed of, until recently.

My finger hurt. I looked down to see that I had nicked it with the peeler. I don’t usually hurt myself in the kitchen—hadn’t, even today, with all the strangeness of my hands—but I had now. I watched as a drop of blood pearled on the skin and got sucked in by the white flesh of the apple. Like a vampire, I thought, and suddenly wanted to laugh.

“If you’re sure,” Pat said, but I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t going to move from the hallway. Not while Mr. Quist, or whatever his name was, was standing there.

Mr. Quist smiled at me. He placed his hand on the counter, inside the door where Pat and the others wouldn’t be able to see it. When he pulled it away, the ring sparkled against the floury surface. “Just giving my compliments to the baker,” he said. His lips were curling in a private way, like he was amused by the whole scene. I didn’t like it.

“Thank you,” I gritted out.

Pat and Theo and Jesse stayed while he left. Pat kept his eyes on me, and Jesse and Theo watched him go. I wondered if they worked out that kind of thing beforehand: you look left, I’ll look right, we’ll all keep the bad man from accosting the innocent damsel. Even if the damsel isn’t so innocent.

“You all right, Sunshine?” Pat asked when he was gone.

“Great,” I said, aiming for bright and landing somewhere just short of desperate. I could tell by Pat’s face that he wasn’t fooled for a second, but they did eventually leave me alone.

As soon as they were gone, I slipped the ring in the pocket of my jeans.

***

I probably shouldn’t have touched it, actually. Touching magical objects you don’t know anything about is a big no-no. Sure, I had created it, but fifteen years had gone by since then. I didn’t know what had been done to it, or under what circumstances it had been separated from my grandmother.

But by the time I thought of that, it was too late, and it didn’t feel like bad news in my pocket. I had a feeling I would know, after my encounter with—but I still wasn’t thinking his name this morning—and I wasn’t getting anything off it except a light buzz when I touched it. Like the tickle of air through combox vents.

None of that made me feel much better about Mr. Quist, though. I don’t like people who smirk at me when they get me upset, and I don’t like people who hand me family heirlooms without telling me where they got them. (Even if, to be fair, he hadn’t had much of a chance before Pat and all showed up. I wasn’t inclined to be fair. I also wasn’t inclined to let him get away without giving me answers.)

How do you arrange a meeting with a person you only know by their funny hair and their probable pseudonym?

A hypothetical question; I didn’t want to see him again. I had learned a little bit lately about diving into things I shouldn’t, and this was definitely one of those things. Even if he had given me my grandmother’s ring and implied that he knew her. That was the bait; I didn’t need to wander around looking for the trap.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter, because Mr. Quist was leaning against my car when I left Charlie’s.

I stiffened and stopped about ten feet away. I wondered if he was expecting me to drive us somewhere. Didn’t he know about stranger danger?

I could have turned around and gone back into the coffeehouse. Some of the SOF gang was still there (did they ever go back their office to work?), and I could have asked them for help. Heck, some of them had probably followed me out and were watching from discreet distances. I could probably just scream, and they would come running.

Six months earlier I’m sure I would have. I wasn’t even totally sure why I didn’t now—a stranger who knows your name leaning against your car is one of the scenarios where it’s okay to call in the authorities. But I’d gotten so used to keeping secrets, and at this point it was automatic. I didn’t know what overlap this would have with the Con part of my life, but I didn’t scream.

I took a few steps closer so it wouldn’t look strange, me standing so far back. “I’m not getting in the car with you,” I said, at a normal volume.

“I wouldn’t ask it of you,” he said.

I snorted, which was maybe rude, but he deserved it. “Because you’re such a gentleman?”

His face didn’t show anything except mild amusement. I wasn’t sure he actually had any other expressions. “I was sent to give you a message.”

“Yeah?” I said. “By whom?”

He gestured at me. “You have the ring.”

I put my hand against the outside of my pocket automatically. The ring still didn’t seem to be hostile, but my heart was beating fast anyway. “My grandmother sent you,” I said, and it was half a question. My grandmother, who I hadn’t heard from in fifteen years, if you don’t count dreams, and who was probably dead. If not worse.

He paused before answering. “That’s…not part of the message,” he said carefully.

Getting angry has always been easier for me than being scared. “Well, you said you were here to deliver it. Get on with it.”

“Do you know Lakeview?” he asked.

“Lakeview? Of course.” Lakeview is a town a couple hours to the east of us, ironically nowhere near the lake. It has the best collection of outlet malls in the country—the advertisers like to say in the world, which I think is pretty icarus of them—and we used to go there before solstices when I was little. Once Aimil and I went out there to get a dress for her to go to a wedding of fellow librarians. It also has one of the big cineplexes, the kind that show first-run movies on opening nights, but two hours is a little far for all but the most devoted fans. “You want to go shopping?”

“I want you to meet someone there.” He handed me a slip of paper, and I took it, because that’s what you do when people hand you things, even when you might not if you took two seconds to think it over. “You’re not working tomorrow afternoon.”

It wasn’t a question. I narrowed my eyes at him. Our coffeehouse schedule isn’t heavily secured or anything. Why would we bother to hide it when no one but us cares about it? Except that apparently this man did.

The paper in my hand was folded. I opened it up and saw an address: just a number and a street, nothing that meant anything to me.

“Why would I listen to you?” I asked.

“Because I gave you the ring,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean anything.” It didn’t. He could have gotten it anywhere. Stolen it, for all I knew. Ripped it off my grandmother’s hand. Fished it out of her junk drawer.

“It’s up to you,” he said with a shrug, like he honestly didn’t care. Then he smiled, but not the kind of smile that made me feel better about anything. “It’s supposed to be very sunny tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

I was left gaping after him as he walked away.

***

I changed my mind about going to the meeting about six times on the drive home. It’s not a long drive, so that will tell you a lot. There wasn’t any point to going: if it was a trap, then it was a terrible idea, and even if it wasn’t, what did I have to gain?

Well, that last question had a pretty obvious answer. The ring came from my grandmother, in some way or another, and I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, her or anyone from my father’s side of the family. The Blaises all disappeared in the wars, everyone knew that, but no one knew how, and this time last year I wouldn’t have said I cared much. I would have been sad about my grandmother, but I wouldn’t have been rabidly curious.

Now I knew a bit more—and at the same time a lot less—about what my magical heritage meant, and this might be my only chance to get answers to the questions that mattered a lot more, now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out more, but considering that more had found _me,_ this chance seemed a little too good to throw away.

And a little too stupid to take, at the same time.

I wasn’t expecting Con to show up that night, so of course that’s when he did. I had fallen asleep as soon as I got home—still running on a deficit from the day before—and our alliance was over, as far as I knew. What we had done last night didn’t mean he’d have to stick around and keep concerning himself with me. But when I woke up in the middle of the night, he was in my chair.

Vampire in the room.

I sat up quickly. He was motionless in that way that only vampires are, and even after everything, my heart started beating harder with instinctive awareness. Last time I saw him he was—

“Is everything all right?” I asked. “With…”

“There have been no signs,” he said. “I came here to ask that question of you.”

“I thought you would…know,” I said.

He was silent for a moment, considering. Or at least that was how I interpreted the silence. It was so strange, seeing his face in the normal shadow of darkness again. “Yes and no,” he said. “I would know if you were gravely harmed. But if there were a lesser danger, or the portents of a danger, I would have no way of knowing.”

Great. Nothing formidable about that. Not that I had always liked the idea of a vampire knowing my business, but it was somewhat reassuring in general to know that if you were about to be skegged by a demon, someone would know, even if they couldn’t help at the moment. And I guessed this meant I wouldn’t know the same things about him.

I wondered if this meant he didn’t want to know those things. But he had shown up in my bedroom, hadn’t he?

“Well, I think the SOF is stalking me for my own protection,” I said. “And—”

I stopped talking, because he leaned forward. Suddenly, of course, because all vampire movements are sudden. His face contorted in something that might have been confusion.

“You smell…different,” he said.

Now he was critiquing my smell. This night was just full of joys. I spread my hands. “Apple pie?”

“No,” he said.

I hadn’t really thought it was apple pie. “There was…a man,” I said.

I told him about Mr. Quist. I tried not to make it sound like he creeped me out—I didn’t want it to seem like I was asking for help, or like I thought I had a right to ask for his help. I wasn’t sure where we stood with that. But I’ve never been able to act to save my life—or, as I’d discovered recently, maybe only to save my life—so I don’t think he was fooled.

Con didn’t seem offended that I’d told him. Not that I was sure what vampire offense would look like. “You said he leaned against your car?” he said when I was done.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a pause. Then, “Well?” he said, with a little gesture, like I should go first.

Oh. Right. I took mental inventory and resigned myself to going outside in pajamas and a bathrobe. “Let’s go, then.”

It was a good thing I grabbed the bathrobe, because Con stood by the car for ten solid minutes, staring at the metal from various distances and shifting his head minutely in silence.

Vampire senses are different from human ones, he’d told me. I wondered what he was sensing.

“Demon,” he said finally. “Probably part-blood. I cannot determine the kind, but something from the spinoid family.”

Fantastic. The guy was a demon. I left aside the part where Con was apparently a demon identifier and heaved in a breath of night air. “I didn’t see any spines.”

“Sometimes they are difficult to see,” he said.

Was that a joke? It was nearly impossible to tell with Con. “I guess that makes my decision easier.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and didn’t clarify further.

I showed him the piece of paper next, and shook his head. No, the address didn’t mean anything to him. I wasn’t sure any human address would, anyway. “Can I see the ring?” he asked.

I handed it to him. I had put it in my bathrobe pocket before going outside. It buzzed a little against my hand again, nothing serious, but as soon as it touched Con’s skin he hissed and ripped his hand away as soon as he touched it. Before I could blink, he was five feet away, the ring on the ground.

“Sorry!” I said. I started to bend to pick it up, then realized that might not be a smart thing to do and stopped. It looked innocent, a little silver circle against the dark grass, gleaming in the porch light. “Sorry, it didn’t feel—wrong, to me, earlier.”

“It wouldn’t.” He was still standing back, giving the ring a wide berth. His hands were by his sides, and I couldn’t see any injury to them, but maybe I wouldn’t. “It is not—bad. It is merely inimical to me.”

Right. Vampire. There were probably plenty of not-bad things that were inimical to him. Even things that I had created. “The pocketknife didn’t hurt you.”

He paused before answering. “That was…your magic,” he said at last. “This ring may have been created with your magic, but it was before you knew me, and it has been steeped with others since then. It is not attuned to me. Nor was it given to me with the intention of preventing harm, as the pocketknife was.”

“Sorry,” I said again. I did bend and pick up the ring now, since he seemed to be saying I could. It was quiet in my hand, like maybe it was trying to be well behaved. Or lying in wait. “Was it…er, could you tell…”

There was a longer pause this time. “It may have come from the Blaises,” he said. “The magic is the right type for that. But it has been heavily used for many purposes, and I cannot say for certain. I do not think, in any case, that it wishes you harm.”

No. I thought I would have known if it did that. I slid my finger along its curves in the pocket of my bathrobe and felt daring for doing so. Heavily used—for what?

I wanted to ask about the demon, but Con had never seemed like one for giving advice. This wasn’t his problem, anyway—just a piece of my heritage rearing its medusan head.

But I had my grandmother’s ring in my pocket. And I didn’t know what to do.

In the end, I didn’t have to ask. He must have seen my face doing whatever it was doing in the lamplight and taken pity on me, because he said, after a long silence, “I do not know about the demon. In my encounters with them over the years, I have found that their motives towards humans vary. It may be that he wishes you harm. But he may very likely hold information that would be beneficial to you. And,” he said after another pause, “it may be equally as dangerous to refrain.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Damn him.

***

I’m not sure I would have gone, even after that, if it hadn’t been for what happened at the coffeehouse the next morning.

It was quieter than the previous morning. Or maybe it was just quieter in my head. Some of the SOF gang were there, but not all, and my skin felt a little more like my own. I wasn’t sure if it was going back to normal or I was just getting used to it; I was losing track at this point. Either way, the texture of dough under my hands didn’t feel strange anymore.

I was in the front and halfway through loading maple mayhems in the front case—the sugar coating is breakable enough that I won’t let anyone else handle them en masse—when my skin started prickling. It was the same kind of feeling as when Yolande had cast the net of lights over me, when they had each sunk into my skin with a prick of heat that was almost like pain but not quite. I looked at my arm now, and the light glanced off it for just a second, like my light-web was showing itself to me.

When I stood up behind the counter, I came face-to-face with the Goddess of Pain.

I hadn’t seen her since the interrogation at SOF headquarters. I might have thought she would look less scary outside her own turf, when she wasn’t interrogating me, but actually it was instantly worse. In SOF headquarters she had, at least, matched her surroundings. Here she was in my world, my coffeehouse where I served cinnamon rolls and apple cider donuts, and the wrongness of the setting made everything worse. Like finding a great kali nuclear warhead hiding under your grandmother’s quilt.

I went stiff immediately. She was standing in front of the counter like a regular paying customer. Maybe she even _was_ a paying customer. But my muscles were on lockdown.

I’m sure she could tell. They probably give courses in that kind of thing at SOF-henchwoman school. They probably also give courses in finding out if what a potential criminal has said in an interrogation is the truth or not, and what had she found out about me?

“Miss Seddon,” she said. I could see Jesse and Pat and Theo and John over her shoulder, studiously not looking my way. Wise men.

“What can I get you?” I asked in my customer voice. I don’t use it all that often anymore, since I don’t usually work the register. But at the coffeehouse, if you’re behind the counter and everyone else is busy, you work the register. And I wasn’t about to foist her off on anyone else.

“I wanted to come see where you worked,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about it.”

That was in no way, shape, or form what she’d really come for. I couldn’t guess what it was yet, though. If she was going to haul me off, there was no need for the fake niceties.

She wasn’t giving off the great sick-making waves at the moment, but her shadows were still wrong. Too deep, like they weren’t shadows but actual gaps. This was the woman who was supposed to be in charge of the good guys.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

She was looking at me and not the baked goods. “I hear you had a visitor yesterday.”

I blinked, probably a bit too tellingly. “We get a lot of people in here.”

“But there was one who wanted something in particular.”

I wondered who had told her. Was one of the SOF agents from yesterday a secret Goddess flunky, or did she have a third eye hidden under her hair helmet?

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

She leaned over the counter. “Sunshine,” she said, and it was probably meant to sound sympathetic. I wondered if anyone was ever fooled by this. “We’re here to help you with things like this. If dangerous—individuals—approach you, we should be the first ones you call.”

As if I would ever call her about anything, up to and including global meltdown. “I don’t remember anyone dangerous,” I said.

She leaned back, mouth pressed together a little. I wasn’t being a good little member of the public. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, though she obviously wasn’t. “You can’t be too careful with your safety. This”—she shrugged a shoulder at the rest of the coffeehouse—“can’t protect you from everything.” She smiled, a bad smile. “You’d be surprised how vulnerable even a large group of people in a building like this can be.”

I saw red. Literally: the room went red-furred for a moment. I was sure she was trying to make it sound like she was worried about my safety, but what she was doing was unmistakably threatening me. No—threatening the coffeehouse, and that was worse. I already knew I could go through a lot, and even then, if she really wanted to disregard public appearances and take me out, she probably could. Going after the coffeehouse patrons would take almost no effort at all.

“Thanks for your concern,” I said, and it took every drop of control I had not to say anything further. I may be a bitch, but sometimes a little bit of self-preservation instinct does kick in. It kicked in now, hardcore.

She nodded. It obviously wasn’t all she wanted to do, either, but she couldn’t exactly haul me in for questioning about something I said hadn’t even happened, not without causing a huge scene. And this was my territory.

“Did you want anything?” I asked.

She ordered an apple cozy to go. I almost asked her if she was serious.

I watched as she worked her way through the coffeehouse crowd to the door. She paused by Pat’s table, and the two of them exchanged a few words. When she was gone, Pat met my eyes, and I didn’t even pretend to look away.

I was clutching the counter so hard my fingers hurt. It wasn’t fear, either, though maybe there was a little of that mixed in. Like I said, it’s always been easier, more comfortable, for me to get angry than afraid. And she had given me plenty of reason. A big group of people in daylight is protected from a lot of things, but you can’t put wards around a public coffeehouse, and you can’t ward, anyway, against a lot of the things that humans can do to you. Guns, and bombs, and attacking humans, and a lot of other things at the SOF’s disposal could get through any wards we tried.

If the Goddess went after the coffeehouse to get to me, what side would Pat and Jesse take?

But no. She would never be so direct as to have SOF attack the coffeehouse. It would be subtler things. She was a bureaucrat, after all: master of the paper-pushers. The red-furred edges came back to my vision.

I had gotten one other thing out of the interview: the Goddess didn’t like Mr. Quist. This didn’t necessarily say a lot for him, because it was the Goddess’ job to dislike things that were bad for humanity. But if I were in a room with the Goddess and one of the Goddess’ enemies, I would go to the enemy’s side every time.

I still didn’t want to go to Lakeview. But I was feeling perverse now, and anything I could do to spit in the Goddess’ face held some appeal. There was another piece of it, too: a part of me that wanted to know, now more than ever, where the ring had come from. What it could tell me about my magical inheritance. Because I was starting to feel like I might need to use it.

I didn’t want to use it. Or maybe a part of me did, but I didn’t want to need to use it, and I certainly didn’t want it to be because someone was holding a skegging bureaucratic stamp over Charlie’s coffeehouse. Damn it to carthaginian hell.

***

I left the coffeehouse at eleven. Paulie was on the lunch rush. Two hours there, two hours back, and a few extra in between, and I should be back in time for dinner, but I gave Paulie the heads up and some extra bowls of muffin dough just in case. I’d been leaving the coffeehouse to fend for itself while I got held captive by the dark too often lately, and I was sick of it.

I remembered the drive to Lakeview from the trip with Aimil and a few other times my wardrobe situation had gotten dire enough that my mother bullied me into a major shopping trip. City outskirts, and then not much for a while, and then the beginning of strip malls trying to capitalize on the outlets’ draw to sell you lottery tickets and replacement car parts.

The Lakeview outlets themselves were the kind of place where they think a two-story fake stucco facade on a one-story building makes the building look like it’s two stories tall, and that all people really want from the outdoors is a three-foot strip of grass and a little manicured path. And ten acres of parking lot, of course. Most of the parking lots were empty, at one o’clock on a weekday with the weather still nice enough to enjoy the outdoors. It gave me some hope for the state of humanity, if they still preferred real grass to the tiny strips between sidewalk and parking lot.

The street on the little piece of paper Mr. Quist had given me was past the biggest of the outlets. I found it and turned onto it, and the scenery changed right away: we were out of parking-lot land, and back in the sort of sprawling nature-plus-convenience-stores you get in your more expansive suburbs.

Even that changed as I went along—I kept having to check the little piece of paper to make sure I hadn’t gotten the number wrong, because I kept not even being in the neighborhood—and there started being actual forests. Not the dense kind you get in your darker fairy tales, but the kind that means nothing’s been done with the land for a while, and the trees have been allowed to come back.

I was starting to get nervous. Not because of the forests, really, because I probably wouldn’t have been any safer in a more populated area, but just because I kept thinking I was there and not being there yet, and that wreaked havoc on my nerves.

When I did get there, it was a bit of an anticlimax. Just a big house, kind of traditional and clean-looking, like maybe a farmhouse built very recently for very rich farmers and just given a coat of paint last week, set far back from the street with a big lawn in front of it and a driveway with a sign.

Greentree Sanitarium. I had to give it some credit for honesty: at least it had actual greenery.

I parked the car in the little gravely area next to the sign. I was feeling very nervous now. I put my hands in my pockets before getting out of the car, to check on the ring and the pocketknife I’d put in them this morning. (I’d put them in separate pockets, because I wasn’t quite sure about them meeting, after what the ring did to Con. I didn’t want it giving my pocketknife any ideas.)

The pocketknife was pleasantly warm. It could have just been body heat, but I didn’t think so. The ring buzzed at me a little, not saying much, but it was there.

There wasn’t a whole lot more I could have done to prepare myself. I didn’t have any of the magical tools you tend to see the cartoon sorcerers wielding—and even if I’d had then, I wouldn’t have known how to use them. I wasn’t a sorcerer. I was a baker with an affinity for vampires. In the daylight.

Mr. Quist had been right about it being sunny. I would have to hope that was enough.

My skin was prickling as I got out of the car. Just general nerves, though, I was pretty sure, not the kind of warning the sun-web had given in the coffeehouse that morning. I shut the car door, and someone differentiated himself from the sign and came toward me.

It was Mr. Quist.

It was almost a letdown, having it be someone I knew. Well—for some value of “knew.” “You said I was supposed to meet someone,” I said.

He was wearing a bowler hat over his funny hair this afternoon. He still didn’t look like a demon. “I didn’t say that someone wasn’t me.”

I scowled. I’ve never had any patience for pedantry. If you don’t believe me, there are a dozen high school teachers ready to testify to it. “Well, if you had something to tell me, why didn’t you just tell me yesterday?”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “I am not the message.”

That was a strange way to put it, and it gave me pause. If he wasn’t the message, who was? The message was a person? That wasn’t how messages usually worked.

He turned to look at the sanitarium, and I followed his gaze. I was pretty sure sanitarium was code for mental institution. I had never been inside one, but I knew they varied. This didn’t seem like one of the gore ones where they stuck splinters under your fingernails as part of aversion therapy and thought electric currents through the brain were the best invention since unbreakable bed restraints. But maybe you couldn’t tell that kind of thing from the outside.

“I used to be there,” he said.

I jerked in surprise. Not very politically correct of me, maybe—it wasn’t like I didn’t know that the government (or the medical establishment, if you want to think of those two as separate) was capable of putting people away for reasons that weren’t always the best, and that even if the reasons were good, it didn’t mean the person was someone to be afraid of—but I already didn’t trust Mr. Quist. The fact that someone, at one point, had judged him worthy of time in a mental institution didn’t make me feel any better about him, exactly.

He caught me looking and smiled. I’m sure he guessed what I was thinking. “Yes,” he said, “silly of them, really. But they don’t like letting bad-magic crosses run around loose.”

That made me go really stiff and start frantically calculating escape routes. If he really did have magic-handling and demon blood, then I would probably need one pretty soon, like yesterday. I wished I hadn’t put the key back into my pocket.

The thing is, bad-magic crosses can be okay. Maybe five percent of the time. But that five percent doesn’t go around handing out magically charged objects from old friends, and they don’t get put in mental institutions. Probably. Even nice ones with yellow paint and white trim and lots of trees around.

He was full-on smiling now, like he loved telling that to people and watching them freak out. “Don’t worry; I’m not going to attack you,” he said.

I didn’t bother telling him that that’s just what he would say if he were going to attack me. “That’s not a secure institution,” I said instead.

“Not above ground,” he said.

My eyes flicked to the building. There was no sign of anything, anything, that wasn’t the cheerful, sprawling farmhouse. But then, there wouldn’t be, would there?

I wondered how far underground it went. I wondered if it was under our feet right now. I wondered if I could get to my car before he caught up with me.

“They don’t like to let the dangerous ones have sunlight,” he said. “I’m sure you understand.”

I stared at him. I wasn’t sure I understood, but I thought I did, and if so, that made twice I’d been threatened today. This morning I would have said a threat to Charlie and my mother and Billy and Kenny and Mel and Emmy and Kyoko was worse than a threat to me, personally, but now I was thinking of small white rooms with heavy locks on the doors and no windows, and I was feeling dizzy.

The sun was still on my face, though. I felt the reassuring tingle of the light-web on my skin. _Shhhh,_ said the wind in the leaves of my tree.

“What did you want to tell me?” I asked.

He pointed at the house. Or, no, at the ground in front of the house. “We have to go in there.”

He got a lot closer to me in the time it took me to pick my jaw up off the ground. At the rate things were going this week, I was going to need to hardwire the thing to my ears. “Why?” I asked.

“You didn’t ask what magic-handling family I come from,” he said.

No, I hadn’t. I had no reason to ask. He had no reason to mention it, unless…

“Your grandmother wasn’t really a friend,” he said. “More like—family.”

I had seen it coming, and it was still a gut-punch. Cinnamon-roll dough with all the air knocked out of it. I barely noticed his grip on my arm, because I needed it to hold me up.

It didn’t have to mean anything. He could be an outcross. He didn’t look like me—didn’t have to be a near relative. I had never seen him before, when I was a kid, and my mom hadn’t seemed to recognize him when he came into the coffeehouse. Or even if he were—an uncle, or something—it could have been the other side of his family that had the demon blood in it.

But he wouldn’t have looked at me with pity, if that were the case.

“No,” I said, and that was when I noticed that both of his hands were gripping my upper arms.

“Sunshine, no, wait,” he said, but I was gone by then: toxic shiva flailing mess with fists and knees going everywhere they could, which wasn’t very far with his hands around my arms like that, but my feet could reach, and I kicked as hard as I could. This wasn’t how I—this wasn’t the—

I might have gone on doing that for a long time, but he threw me across the lawn—threw, far farther than he should have been able to. I landed on the ground, stunned.

“Sunshine,” he said, and his voice was louder than it had been. “I am not going to put you in here.”

“Let me go,” I said, even though he had, technically. He could still run faster than I could, if it came down to that, and I was on the ground.

“I’ll do what I need to to prove it,” he said.

What he did next was take a knife from the pocket of his suit jacket. His boring, guarding-the-global-council-or-something-equally-stuffy suit jacket. The knife wasn’t boring at all: the handle was set with red jewels, and the blade curved wickedly. I could see the sun flash off it as he sliced into his wrist.

I flinched at that. Blood will always get to me. It wasn’t a big cut, but bright red blood welled out of it at an alarming rate. He put a little vial underneath the blood and caught it until the vial was halfway full. Then he stoppered it and pressed a handkerchief to his wrist. He threw the vial at me.

I caught it. The blood sloshed redly against the glass, and I held it away from myself.

“There,” he said. “Put it anywhere you like. If I try to do anything you don’t want me to do, you’ll have recourse.”

I didn’t know how to do blood magic. He might have known that, if he’d been paying as much attention to me as he seemed to have been, but he might not have. If he didn’t know it, then giving someone—especially someone you know is a magic user—a vial of your blood is the most extreme way of leaving yourself open to harm. Sex-without-a-condom extreme, root-password-to-your-operating-system extreme. You might as well go to a known vampire haunt and lie down with your neck exposed. And even if I didn’t know how to do blood magic, if he tried to lock me up in that place, I was pretty sure I could figure something out. Maybe that’s when my demon-and-magic heritage would finally flare into full homicidal glory.

Whatever he was trying to do, it was either diabolically treacherous, or it was very important to him. Maybe both.

I tucked the vial into my bra, where my pocketknife used to life. My hands were shaking again. “All right,” I said.

***

Sneaking into the facility was easy, mainly because we didn’t sneak.

There are advantages to rolling up next to someone in the most boring suit ever created by tailors. Mr. Quist flashed them a badge I couldn’t see and gave them a name—another name I assumed wasn’t his real one—and a fake name for me, and he filled out some things on a form. I assumed the badge was fake, too. They probably don’t give real badges to bad-magic crosses who were once inside tiny cells without sunlight. I stood next to him and tried not to look like I’d been working with flour all morning, or like just being at the reception desk of this building made me want to twitch.

It was a lot whiter and starker on the inside than it looked from the outside. It got a lot more so when we went into a stairwell and started going down. I had assumed that we’d be going to the underground facility when he first told me we were going inside, and that was the only reason I wasn’t freaking out. Much. I had my hands clenched in my pockets, one around the pocketknife and one around the ring, because even if I didn’t trust the ring yet, the buzzing made me feel better. I let go of it for a moment to run my fingers along my collarbone where the necklace from Con had sunk into my skin.

If someone tried to put me in a cell, would Con be able to come find me?

I’m not sure how many flights of stairs we went down. I tried to count, but the distance between the landings was irregular, and I got thrown off. At least eight. Maybe more.

When we finally stopped at one of the landings and went through the door, I was hit with an immediate wave of _no._ It was like stepping into Pat’s SOF car when it had its bad-spot armor on, heavy and smothering and making it so that you can’t breathe except through little chinks. It hit me like that, strong enough that my vision went black for a moment, and then it lessened—not enough to be gone, but enough so that I could breathe without gasping. Enough so that I felt my body take on the burden of the remaining oppressiveness and bear it.

Mr. Quist didn’t pause while I gasped for breath; he had probably known what to expect. Or maybe he was immune. He strode ahead into a hallway dotted with little doors.

The small white rooms. I could see into some of them: their doors had clear glass panes, for whatever reason, maybe because the doctors—if that was that they were—needed to see them, or maybe to show them the freedom they couldn’t have. Whatever the reason, the glass still seemed to have the heavy-armor magic-proof coating on it the way the whole hallway did. You don’t realize how much you normally sense another person’s energy until you don’t anymore—until they’re on the other side of a pane of glass that doesn’t let anything through. I kept thinking they were movies or holograms or something like that because of how impossible it was to believe they were real without that intangible evidence.

It was difficult to believe they were real for other reasons, too. Some of them looked like normal humans, but others had horns or fur or purple faces or elongated bodies or any of the hundreds of features that can mark someone as partially a demon. Some of them were looking at the doors, but I didn’t think they could see out, because they didn’t react when we walked by. And all of their faces, all of them, were horrifying, even the ones that looked human. Horrifying in their blankness, or their despair, or their anger. Most of them were one of the first two, but there were a few where anger and bitterness had sunk in so deep that it had twisted their features. They were all motionless.

“Are they frozen?” I asked.

“No,” Mr. Quist said. He spoke in a normal voice, which seemed too loud for the hallway, but I guessed they couldn’t hear us. “Most of them have just been in here a long time. And it’s hard to want to move when you’re inside the walls. It slows everything down.”

He had been inside those walls once. I wondered if he was remembering—of course he was, how could he not, but I couldn’t see it in his face.

“Are they dangerous?” I asked.

“That depends,” he said. His eyes were light gray, calm. “Do you think power is always a threat to humanity?”

I didn’t answer. If these were all bad-magic crosses, then loose, they could have wreaked destruction on par with the worst of the Voodoo Wars. Pira-demon-with-a-reflector-shield levels of destruction. And that was just the small number we’d seen. The staircase had kept going down after we’d stopped following it.

“Here,” Mr. Quist said, and stopped in front of a cell.

I backed up to see why he’d stopped. The cell was one of the ones with a clear pane in the door. Inside was a woman, old, perhaps as old as Yolande. It was hard to tell, because her skin was lined, but clear, and her hair was so white it almost looked blond. She sat very still, as still as the others, but she glowed with power, hair and skin and eyes. It was like she was surrounded by a pale white light that cut through the fluorescent flatness.

My grandmother.

**Author's Note:**

> In the next episode (not featured here), the questionable stranger-slash-relative-slash-bad-magic-cross convinces our heroine not to try to spring her grandmother from the far-too-secure government facility just yet, and tells her instead about the alliance of humans and part-bloods working to free all the inmates en masse. Our heroine freaks out a bit, and we learn Aimil's true rank and title.


End file.
